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“Pick one,” Mulally said.

Kuzak and his team decided to focus on Smith’s kinetic design theme. Though there would be minor variations to account for regional requirements, this look would define all of Ford’s globally available vehicles going forward—in other words, most of the company’s lineup. A few products that were specific to certain regions, such as the Ford Mustang and F-150 pickup, would retain their local flavor, albeit with a nod to this overarching look.

Agreeing on a common design language made it easier to create vehicles for the world market. But that was not the only reason Mulally insisted on it. It was also about building Ford’s brand. He wanted a Ford to be instantly recognizable as a Ford whether it was in Detroit or Dresden, São Paulo or Shanghai. And he did not want it to stop with the exterior. Mulally insisted that this commonality extend to the look, feel, and placement of knobs and switches—even the way a Ford door sounded when it was closed. Kuzak had already been working in this direction in North America before Mulally arrived. He referred to the approach as “Feels right, sounds tight.” Now he had the brief to take it around the world. Together, all of these attributes would form what Kuzak referred to as the Ford brand DNA—a genome that was designed and engineered to convey quality, innovation, and style.

“It’s all aimed at creating a design that creates a visceral reaction in people,” he explained. “
We want people to have strong, emotional reactions to our products.”

T
he rapid pace of the revolution in Dearborn began to silence the skeptics who had doubted the ability of an outsider to make sense of such a complex business. But Mulally was finding the automobile industry a lot more complicated than he had anticipated—particularly when it came to labor relations and government regulations.

As he studied Ford’s contract with the UAW, Mulally was dismayed to discover that Ford could not close factories in the United States without the consent of the union. Even then it had to continue to pay idled workers and cover their benefits until new jobs could be found for them. Nor could the company force them to relocate. This was a real problem in places like Edison, New Jersey, where about 160 workers remained on the Ford payroll three years after their plant—the only one in the region—had been shut down. The only option was buyouts. Ford was offering generous packages to all of its UAW-represented employees as part of Fields’ accelerated Way Forward plan, but the whole idea of paying people to leave the company was hard for Mulally to swallow. When he slashed Boeing’s workforce after the September 11 attacks, it had all been
accomplished with the stroke of a pen. In the automobile industry, nothing was that simple.

Mulally was also learning about the dizzying array of rules and regulations imposed by governments around the world on Ford and its products. There were no global standards for cars and trucks; the United States followed one set of rules, while most of the rest of the world followed another. Turn signals, for example, were required to be amber in most countries, but in the United States, the rear ones could also be red. In Europe, additional indicator lights were required on the side of the vehicle, but those were optional in the United States. Changing the color of a taillight lens was relatively simple, but changing the position of the front bumper to meet the different standards in Europe and the United States was a major engineering feat. In Europe, the emphasis was on protecting pedestrians; the U.S. rules were designed to protect vehicles and the people riding in them. Crash tests were also conducted differently in different regions, each subject to different standards. All of this made Mulally’s dream of homogenizing Ford’s global lineup a stretch goal for the company’s designers and engineers.

Safety standards were not the only thing the United States and European Union differed on either. E.U. lawmakers were pushing for tighter restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions, while the U.S. Congress was preparing tough new fuel-economy targets. Designing products for worldwide consumption would require Ford to serve both masters.

Mulally found the American mileage restrictions particularly galling. Known as the corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE, regulations, they established sales-weighted mileage standards for all of the automakers. That meant a company could produce as many gas-guzzling SUVs as it wanted, as long as it also made a similar number of fuel-efficient compacts. Most other nations used high fuel taxes to dissuade drivers from choosing inefficient vehicles. CAFE put the onus on the car companies. It appealed to America’s libertarian sensibilities, but it forced automakers to produce cars that nobody wanted to buy and then sell them at a substantial loss. In a nation with some of the lowest gasoline prices on the planet, there was little incentive
for consumers to choose a small car—particularly when most of their neighbors were tooling around in enormous trucks.

When Mulally studied the data, he found that, despite the billions of dollars spent by automakers to meet the CAFE requirements, the American people were driving farther, using more gasoline, and importing more oil than they were when the first limits went into effect in 1975. He made the mistake of sharing his findings with Congress during a hearing on even tougher proposed standards before the House Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality on March 14.

“When the CAFE law passed in the 1970s, the goal was to reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” he told lawmakers. “Frankly, that did not work.”

The members of Congress were not accustomed to this sort of candor—particularly from the CEOs of companies who were the target of new regulations they were about to vote on. One lawmaker asked the representatives of the other car companies on the panel if they agreed with Mulally. Their answers were far more equivocal. But Mulally was not finished. He reminded the legislators that, despite their best efforts, consumers were still the ones who decided what they drove. If Washington wanted them to drive smaller cars, the government should consider other alternatives, such as a higher tax on gasoline. Many of the lawmakers bristled at Mulally’s implied criticism of their approach to the problem and made sure he knew it.

Mulally was surprised by the animosity he felt emanating from the dais during this first visit to Capitol Hill as the head of Ford Motor Company. At Boeing he had worked closely with the federal government on a number of issues, and his presence was always welcomed—particularly by politicians eager to get a piece of Boeing’s production in their district. There was a lot less love for the American automobile industry.

These guys act like we’re running guns or smuggling drugs!
he thought as he listened to the legislators rail against Detroit’s intransigence on the fuel-economy front.
This is going to make things a lot harder
.

Mulally was not opposed to better gas mileage or reducing greenhouse gases. He proved that a few weeks later by naming the company’s first vice president of sustainability, environment, and safety
engineering, Sue Cischke, who would also be the first woman on his senior leadership team.

“I firmly believe we are at an inflection point in the world’s history as it relates to climate change and energy security. The time for debating whether climate change is real has past,” Mulally said in an e-mail to employees announcing Cischke’s appointment on April 23. “It is time for a conversation about what we, as a society, intend to do to address it.”

T
he task of fixing Ford became Mulally’s all-consuming mission. He got to the office early each morning. He was already answering e-mails by 6
A.M
. He worked until dinnertime, then went home and spent the rest of the evening reading reports, retiring early. He worked seven days a week. Mulally rarely saw his family, though he scheduled regular telephone calls with his wife, children, and mother.

During one conversation with his mother in early 2007, Mrs. Mulally complained that the Dodge van at the senior center she frequented in Lawrence kept breaking down. Since her boy was now the CEO of one of the world’s largest automobile manufacturers, she thought he might be able to help them out. Mulally asked the local Ford dealer to meet with his mother and some of the other ladies at the senior center to pick out a new E-Series van. But she was soon back on the phone complaining that there were too many choices—185 to be exact, and that was not counting all the different colors and upholstery options.

Mulally thought that was ridiculous, but as he studied the order books for other vehicles, he discovered that the problem was not limited to the E-Series. The number of different configurations available for each Ford car and truck was staggering. A customer buying a 2007 Ford Mustang V-6 deluxe model could choose from 16,000 different combinations of colors, upholstery, and features. Building all those different variants taxed Ford’s factories and created a huge amount of work for designers, engineers, and suppliers. It also limited the company’s ability to achieve real economies of scale. Ford’s Japanese competitors offered far fewer choices. Mulally ordered the sales and marketing team to pick the most popular combinations and eliminate
the rest. By the time the next version of the Mustang came out a few months later, the number of buildable combinations had been reduced to just 200.

As for the senior center, Mulally personally delivered a fifteen-passenger van on March 17. The oldsters promptly christened it “the Mulally Trolley” as his white-haired mother showed off her successful son, who stuck around to serve as grand marshal for Lawrence’s St. Patrick’s Day parade. He rode down Locust Street with his mother in the back of a red Mustang convertible, both of them waving to the cheering crowd. No astronaut ever enjoyed a better homecoming.

O
n March 12, Ford closed on the sale of Aston Martin. Bill Ford had put the bespoke British brand up for sale in August 2006, just before Mulally was hired. It was the one recommendation from the Project Game Plan team that everyone could actually agree on. Mulally wholeheartedly endorsed the move; he would have just as soon put “For Sale” signs on Jaguar, Land Rover, and Volvo at the same time. But at least this was a start. The brand of choice for fictional superspy James Bond was sold to a consortium of investors led by motor racing entrepreneur David Richards and backed by Kuwaiti capital. The deal added another $848 million to Mulally’s war chest and began the difficult process of dismantling Ford’s house of brands.
^*

Mulally felt like he was moving at light speed. He had only been at Ford for six months, but he had already fundamentally transformed just about every aspect of the business—and bigger changes were in the offing. Mulally had figured out where Ford needed to go, and he could not wait to get there.

Outside the auto shows and financial briefings, he had been spending much of his time briefing analysts and reporters on his four-point plan to save the company. By the time Mulally took the podium at
the New York International Auto Show on April 4, most could recite each point verbatim. When he delivered the same stump speech there that he had been giving since January, it began to sound a bit stale—particularly to the Wall Street analysts who were always looking for some new tidbit of information to feed into their models.